The expanded use of the Internet has increased communication connections between client devices and server devices. Often, a client device establishes a network connection with a server device by using well-known protocols, such as Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (“TCP/IP”), User Datagram Protocol (“UDP”), and the like. This network connection may be identified by one characteristic or a combination of characteristics, such as a source port, a destination port, a source address, a destination address, a protocol, and the like. Typically, the source address, destination address, destination port, and protocol are relatively fixed for a network connection between a client device and a server device. Thus, the source port may be utilized to uniquely identify a connection between the client device and the server device. Currently, however, the number of source port values that may be utilized may be rather limited (e.g., 216 minus 1024 (i.e., system ports assigned by the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority, as per Request for Comments (RFC) 6335)). Therefore, in situations where thousands of connections are established between a client device and a server device, the source port values may no longer uniquely identify a connection and may be cycled through and reused for different connections. Typically, a source port value may be recycled and used again under certain conditions, such as after a predetermined time limit. However, if the recycle time limit (e.g., 2 ms) is less than the amount of time a connection is established (e.g., 2 sec.), then a source port value may be recycled before a previous connection using the same source port value is closed. Furthermore, SYN flood requests might also have an identical source address, destination address, source port, destination port, and protocol type as an already established TCP connection.
Additionally, the expansion of the Internet has led to improvements in packet traffic management. One such advancement is to split operations between a control segment and a data flow segment as described in more detail in U.S. Pat. No. 7,343,413, filed Mar. 21, 2001, and entitled “Method and System for Optimizing a Network by Independently Scaling Control Segments and Data Flow,” which is hereby incorporated by reference in its entirety into this patent application. However, the splitting of such operations can lead to asynchronous connection states between the control segment and the data flow segment which can slow down the load balancing of packet traffic. For example, the control segment may receive a new connection establishment request before the data flow segment notifies the control segment of a fully terminated previous connection. However, in some situations, the new connection and the previous connection may have a same connection identifier because of the recycling of source port values. As a result, the control segment may not know how to handle the notification of the previously terminated connection. Thus, it is with respect to these considerations and others that the invention has been made.